Designing in Ethereum with Yitong Zhang, Yang You & Calil Capuozzo

are you ready to go should we do this all right well thanks everyone for uh making it here at 9am I can't say I uh I was sure I was gonna make it but I I did and we did and uh you did so uh thanks so much I appreciate it cool well Khalil you want to kick off with a quick intro of uh what we're up to here and then we can uh go on ahead yeah definitely um we'll do a little introductions but generally we're all designers in ethereum we're here to talk about design big topic um and also some of the things that we work on and uh yeah I'm Khalil I work at uniswap I lead designed there worked on Unison for a long time since the beginning um what year what year just so people know true yeah good question well uh at the the earliest stuff was at the end of 2017 and then uniswap was 2018 into 2019 so you know those are the good days really early days you were there at the Genesis yes you know not quite that far back but yeah Yang you want to give a quick intro yeah um hi I'm Yang I started working in the space in 2019 so a little bit after you um my first job was at Anchorage as the first in-house designer so it was a really exciting time there seeing them grow from just secure core custody which on the surface looks like viewing your assets and sending a withdrawing all the way to the uh expanding it to institutional crypto across the entire stack so like governance staking um yeah trading lending everything from there I had moved on to Syndicate to work on investing infrastructure for web3 and at the same time also join Vector Dao which is how I met etong and that's just a phenomenal group of designers that is a really fun time we get to work with some early stage Founders and last year I joined Paradigm leading design for the firm itself building some things internally as well as supporting our portfolio Founders from yeah a variety of stages I just want to call out these two are being very humble they're both heads of design at their previous their respective firms but they don't want to flex it so I will Flex for them I am merely a lowly nobody compared to these two no no I uh no except same-ish roughly uh timeline of History I started uh working in sort of uh crypto stuff around uh early 2018 that's when I joined coinbase uh one of the early designers there worked on everything on the uh the Blue app I say this because the wallet app was green back then um so everything that probably was 2018 to 2021 I had something to do with it um left started this thing called Vector Dao which is a collective of designers and Engineers working in crypto and now I work on Agora improving public governance infrastructure so that's the intro all right so should we kick it off with some lightning round questions let's do it okay okay so um I know the talk uh the name of this talk has changed a little bit but once upon a time I believed that it was called uh one weird trick for designing an ethereum so could we have the two uh guests go and say they're one weird trick for designing an ethereum I'll give you like five seconds to think about it but as heads of design I'm sure you've uh you've got that loaded up already that's a great question do you have something on top of your mind Yang um this is prefacing a thing we may talk about later but I would say thinking outside of what you're building yeah okay that's nice I like that yeah yeah we will talk about it later um my one weird trick to designing an ethereum um basically always make it more simple uh that's the one weird trick yeah okay okay I give you guys a good scores for good tricks but I'm not sure if they were weird enough but uh we'll keep going we'll keep going I got a couple of more uh non-serious questions and then we can get to the meaty stuff so Khalil uh I uh I went and crept your uh your entire history before this talk and I know you're very into gardening so uh curious how your uh interest in gardening shapes your practice as a designer that's really nice I I have thought about this before actually a lot um and I think what gardening teaches me which I think anybody who's grown things kind of feels this um is patience obviously um but also a feeling of like shepherding or stewarding a life outside of yourself and often I do think of design work Design Systems patterns products as having lives of their own and um that I am sort of somewhat separate from them um but I'm guiding them along and I think that sort of perspective of like being a guide is actually pretty important um yeah to design that's awesome okay now a question for you Yang um I know that this time last year you were at East Denver giving a talk about very much the same topic designing for humans and web3 I'm curious that say any of your thoughts changed in the last year since uh any revisions that you want to share with us yeah that's a good question um I would say generally those were a structure of those to be pretty Universal and Timeless so a lot of things like oh we have a lot more noise in the space just because it's an open ecosystem anyone's able to come in and build um everyone all of us are wearing a ton of different hats figuring out things like taxes custing our own assets for the first time I would say no major changes other than I think we can think more critically about building towards a pluribus and what that means to us moving forward cool cool cool okay last random question I have before we go to serious stuff are sporks good or bad ux and if they're good why don't we see them more often I'm gonna call them bad ux I might people might disagree with me but um I do love a good multi-tool but I think I love a tool that does one thing really really well more a classic designer response yeah I mean I agree I think it's a thing that's trying to do a lot like sometimes when we're building we can fall into that trap um but again yeah you think of use cases where you're out camping and you think that that would uh come in handy but I don't see quite that many yeah so I will say I'm not specific enough to the use case okay okay yeah we have sport caters here I understand um all right well listen uh enough about sporks let's talk about ethereum so um why don't I just open up with something fairly General um can you guys tell us sort of a little bit more about um the ethos of Designing ethereum and how that's been different in uh in the sort of in comparison to designing for web 2 companies you guys have obviously deep experience in both would love to hear sort of you uh contrast the experience and highlight some of the unique aspects of working in our field yeah uh I think when I think about designing an ex or just building and designing in ethereum um one metaphor that I think towards is kind of feels like we're all working on school projects so it's fun it's social you get to work with your friends um at the same time you are focused on your section of the essay you throw in a transition in the beginning and end and you throw it into the Google Doc hoping that you know it falls in line with what your teammates are writing and kind of what they're building um I think uh for our world oftentimes most of us are working on just kind of one one part of the stack and we throw in a connect wallet button and we kind of let the users kind of figure out the rest of the experience on their own um I think yeah it's really interesting I think a high level the what's so special about designing in ethereum is this open ecosystem that we do have and allowing um kind of every every Power of the stack is right for Innovation right anything from creating new change to the to apps to wallets and the amazingly like great thing about that is it is open anyone can come and remix off of what exists today and you would think that in theory that leads us to converging on exponentially better design over time right but I think in reality and the flip side of it is we end up with these pretty disjointed user experiences we're not as thinking like end to end where um mostly we're using the same Frameworks of company building and product building that we have in the past years and in web 2 companies and elsewhere and I think that leads us to um yeah some interesting outcomes that we've seen so I guess case in point you know in in real life we never have to think about the payment infrastructure everything that goes on behind the scenes when we're buying a coffee in that apps that have been built today there's such an emphasis on it's always connect wallet and never create wallet in the apps themselves and that's the equivalent of if you're browsing the web and you only see sign in and not sign up like what does that mean for the first user coming in um yeah I think overall if there's it's kind of a an intuitive take but to think outside of what we each are immediately building and to think more end to end and also outside of the kind of Frameworks that we've always been yeah been having over time cool love it um some some of the things that I've learned I think about from this past few years of Designing ethereum have been a lot to do with um kind of ego a little bit I think designers especially in school like there is a little bit of that practice that uh you know focuses on the individual and like what you can produce your identity as a designer and building an ethereum especially in early days of like building a swap UI and having that be forked and kind of you know seeing thousands of different versions of that has really taught me to like kind of remove my ego a little bit from that from design and I think that's actually quite a good thing to be open and like humble about what you can actually impact and what what is happening in that broader story that Yang mentioned um another thing that I think is different in ethereum or just generally in our in our industry is that design does have a kind of an outsized impact actually on the success of some of these products something that we talk about internally is quarter sort of this idea of the thesis of user aligned interfaces um and it's something very important to us at uniswap what this means is that now in if you're building on an open stack on ethereum on a public blockchain really you're competing on the level of ux and design right because the infrastructure the data underneath it is very open right I can go take a you know a seed phrase and I can move wallets I can't do that like on venmo today right for instance and what if it really forces companies to uh innovate like up the level of the stack a little bit if they want to grow and I think this is a unique position to be in and something that designers have to learn right that like the the real kind of unlocks will be at that level um if we are to like scale up that makes a lot of sense let me let me poke you guys a little bit about this so I mean first of all you brought up sort of this uh this interesting uh ego thing where like uh you know you often hear this designers on the internet ah you cripped me I can't believe it I'm gonna call you out you are probably the most designer um anywhere I'm sure many in the audience have uh cripped your design and the forked the unit swap swap interface how does that make you feel is that good is that bad are we uh sort of like a you know compound Ave look the same like a mini swap interfaces look the same like is that standardization good is that standardization bad how do you view this I actually see it as a good thing um I'm really excited when I see forks and I'm even more excited when I see uh Forks could like conceptual Forks not just raw Forks of the interface like I like even inspecting you know uh within the panel on Chrome just to see like does it look the same in the div structure like how deep has somebody gone into recreating that UI and so I do like when that happens and I do think it leads to incremental improvements but at the same time Asian was saying it also means that They're copying all the mistakes that we made which are many right like uh like you know a UI that was developed by a team of three in 2018 has inherent within it like a ton of limitations right because we didn't have the capacity to do whatever and it means that you might be copying a set of constraints that you're not aware of and that can really hold things back and prevent sometimes um deeper thought that would lead to more progress I mean Yang I'm sure in your role as a as a the head honcho of design at Paradigm you get probably this question quite often it's like hey like portfolio companies come to you like we know what we want like look they've done it before it's like this like do you often run into these situations I mean even the vector I feel like we often ran into people were like I just want this but like not pink um so how do you how do you respond to that like how do you how do you work through that is that like a thing that you even see I imagine it must be but maybe I'm wrong yeah I think that is a common I mean even within ourselves as designers I think one of the easy things to do is before where I'm starting on a user flow or something go reference our competitors or whatever is out there today in the existing patterns I think I agree with khalil's point that uh I think you brought up it's a kind of a local maximum that we're at right now but I think um we'll also see a lot of kind of big step changes in terms of infrastructure ZK things that are really much going on behind the scenes or not not exposed to like front end right now but I think we'll create like massive or exponential um I don't know better patterns that we may we may change so I think it's important to keep that in mind and also um yeah kind of remix with uh with intention and think about what what is very specific to uh Founders or audiences specific use case or what they're trying to do yeah that makes sense I mean I think this sort of uh there's sort of this very interesting to me at least history of wallet design in crypto where like if you're there in the early days like a lot of the wallets were genuinely really really weird um and I think that's maybe what held ethereum back for a very long time where like I remember the early days of wallets like they were like messenger apps and people were like WeChat was the right metaphor for this so like status had like it was like a chat app Toshi which is uh what coinbase wallet was before uh it became coinbase wallet was also a chat app that was actually one of the first things I did at coinbase was to rip out the the chat functionality bit to me that was like a very interesting time in ethereum where we're like look we understand these Primitives that we were operating on but we have no idea how people were supposed to interact with them and it seems to me now that we are much more in a convergent phase of user interface design where if you look at uh some of the wallets that are out there coinbase rainbow maybe something else uh they are they all kind of look the same like are we is that good is that bad I mean I know we've talked about it a little bit in the context of swap interfaces but I'm curious on the wallet side I mean these are these are starting to become if you squint a little bit like uh just different colors of the same UI I could answer um what I think yeah I I kind of agree that there is a convergence happening um and I think uh what's what's also interesting is that I've been thinking a lot about how like an organization learns about how to build something and what it means for like a larger team to gain expertise to then be able to innovate right um and I think that in in this world of ethereum a lot of um a lot of times there is this these moments of conversion that happen let's say around the like or convergence around um like the swap interface where each team kind of had to like get its internal understanding of the things so they work um with patterns that we know users like and love and then once you gain that internal like competency and that real deep understanding you start to talk to people that's when you can sort of like take those big next steps forward and so I do expect to see in specifically the world of wallets like a convergence and then like this exponential growth as people find their Niche niches from what their users are telling them that's really great any anything you want to add on that yang not really I think that yeah I very much agree with that and I think it's been interesting to see that evolution of wallets has very much followed the rest of the space where you start out with just you know being able to see your balance be able to send and withdraw then you see all these uh I don't know erc20s pop up and then everyone's able to see you know multiple Assets in their wallet and now it's doing a lot more in terms of kind of app side yeah yeah well listen speaking of uh sort of the the current meta of convergent design um is there anything like out there right now that you are not personally working on that's really catching your eye as something that's kind of special that is worth highlighting um and like you know like in the spirit of calling out things that are interesting yeah I think for this year the animal there's a few things I think I'll just say go through four four items really quickly I think the first is um with this rise of just chat GPT and AI I think it'll uh greatly decrease the gap between kind of ideation and expression especially amongst non-designers so increasing that communication between us the second I think is integrating with kind of web 2 Tech and especially auth I think that we may see kind of wallets or things that may use like apple Pass key or Biometrics that'll greatly increase the experience on both web 2 and web3 web3 itself I think uh increasing in in new tech like ZK both cross-platform or cross bridging as well as like be able to really quickly and get uh get on-chain data will greatly uh yeah well greatly like make the ux of web3 better as well and then finally I think given macro economy it's a chance for our design web redesign Community to get a lot closer as well and to challenge each other thinking to the points that we were making earlier that's awesome and I know Khalil you have uh some thoughts about the 43 37 and wallets in general so yes give you the last minute to share a little bit more about that great um yeah so you know we touched on this topic a little already um I think you know I'm going to show something now to everybody that we've been working on at uniswap um pretty obviously uh because of the topic we've been working on a wallet um so big news here it is um you know this is something we've worked on for a really long time and uh we're really excited to share it also as I mentioned you know is it this big team effort in big team learning that we've gone through um to be able to get here uh I think it represents like our ambition for being you know one Circle outside of that little swap box we really want to get larger and we've been you know educating ourselves a lot about things like 4437 like all this account abstraction stuff and you can expect to see those learnings coming into practice over the next few months um so yeah download it this is the test flight link feel free to scan it and come to our booth to try it out we do think we have a really fresh cool uh vision for what wallets can be and it will also feel familiar and feel like uniswap um so yeah come check it out guys I'm excited about this you know as a as a person who worked on wallets for a very long time I can tell you this is a good wallet you should try it out um thanks so much guys and uh thank you anything to add that uh just to add on I think hats off to the uniswap team it's it's a pretty big milestone just to see um yeah adapt move Upstream um like you were saying so yeah and shout out to the unislab team love you guys yeah all right thanks thanks so much y'all find us at the booth I'm wearing everybody's wearing these shirts come talk to us [Music]